ASUS 650i recapped

[Super Nade]

I posted this in the team lounge but this should help peole who are unsure about recapping this board. Chinstrap gave me the board as I wanted one in my foray into extreme cooling. This is one of the budget boards ASUS offers. Caps were UCC 4V low profile on the CPU VRM, Rubycon MBZ and TK (Tosin Kygo) on the DRAM side. Replace most of them with conductive polymer caps.

Nichion LG,LF series and Sanyo SEPC series. I was thinking about the Chemicon PSA NP-CAPs I have, but then I need it for another project at work. The most critical area would be near the ATX connector. That is where most blow outs occurred with ASUS boards and extreme overclocking.

I also have several Inductors that I can use to beef up the ones on the board. Also, if need be, I can solder MLCC's in parallel with the VRM caps.

 

[Anubis_386]

Excellent work Nade .. I've always wondered how mobo caps cope when we bench to the extreme, it does get awfully chilly around the CPU socket sometimes ..

 

[Super Nade]

Thanks. The problem is, when you push the current regulatory circuitry so far out of spec, the ripple current increases tremendously if the design is too constrained. The caps usually act as a low impedance pathway for ripple current. But ordinary electrolytics support about 3x LESS ripple current as their conductive-polymer counterparts, so they blow up.

 

[andr8]

Nice mod. I love those Nichicon LE/LF/LG series :]

What was the capacitance of the stock capacitors? (the ones that came with the board)

And did overclocking improved after the cap mod?

 

[Super Nade]

Hello Andre and welcome to the forums. The stock caps were 560 uF, 4V ; 1500 uF, 6.3V and 470 uF 16 V. Did overclocking improve? It is hard to say as I have not overclocked it yet. I'm waiting on a liquid nitrogen container to arrive to experiment with.

Now if the capacitors are crap like Chissi, Rulycon, G-Luxon or other junk like Kosin, they will probably blow up even with regular usage (overclocking on air), especially on a board running a Prescott P4 furnace. The ones I replaced are perfectly fine. I only replaced them aticipating tremendously heavy loads with liquid nitrogen cooling.

 

[andr8]

Here's my ABIT AN-M2 with new caps.

Vcore output: Ruby MBZ 1500µF to SANYO SEPC Solid Poly 820µF
Vcore input: Ruby ZL 1200µF to ??? (still need to find good 16V polymer caps)